Churchill

CHURCHILL FORESEES THE EUROPEAN UNION

Today European unity is an accepted fact, despite the prolonged economic crisis that has threatened the existence of the common currency, the euro, and despite the absence of the external threat of the Soviet Union, which was one of the preeminent causes of closer European cooperation in the postwar decades. Although it was widely believed after World War II that Europe had to break the centuries-long cycle of national conflicts, it was not clear that the increasingly formal political and economic integration of Europe was feasible or that the rapid rehabilitation of Germany was necessary for the project to succeed. Few people even considered the idea. Churchill, naturally, was among the first to do so. His approach to the problem of postwar Europe reflects his characteristic statesmanship.

Throughout the closing stages of World War II and in the immediate aftermath, two problems confronted the victorious Western Allies. First, there was the problem of rebuilding Europe’s decimated economy. Solving this problem required solving the second problem: what to do about defeated Germany.

In 1946 and 1947, there were no signs of what later would become known as the “German economic miracle,” the fruit of German finance minister Ludwig Erhard’s courageous decisions to de-control most of Germany’s economy. (Prior to Erhard’s moves, Germans complained that British maladministration, imposed by the socialist government that succeeded Churchill in 1945, was doing more damage to Germany than the wartime bombing.) Erhard’s reforms, however, did not take place until 1948. In 1946 and 1947, much of Europe, and especially Germany, was often close to starvation. The brutal winter of 1946–1947 aggravated already perilous conditions. Germany produced only about half as much food in 1947 as it had done in 1938. Millions were homeless. Western leaders worried about Communist revolution or victory in free elections. America’s Marshall Plan, which began in 1947, helped to prevent complete catastrophe, but the long-term recovery of Europe needed more.

During the war Churchill had briefly expressed support for the notorious “Morgenthau Plan,” named for Roosevelt’s Treasury secretary, Henry Morgenthau Jr. At the second Quebec summit between FDR and Churchill in 1944, Morgenthau proposed that a defeated Germany should be “pastoralized”—its industrial capacity dismantled so completely that Germany would never be able to rearm and threaten war again. Initially Churchill “violently opposed this idea,” as he put it in his memoirs, no doubt recalling the counterproductive results of the punitive terms of the Versailles Treaty after World War I, but he swung round to tentative support for the Morgenthau Plan under pressure from Roosevelt. He understood the logic: “We had seen during the nineteen thirties how easy it was for a highly industrialized Germany to arm herself and threaten her neighbors,” Churchill wrote in Triumph and Tragedy. But eventually even Roosevelt withdrew his support from Morgenthau’s punitive proposal. (Hitler skillfully exploited the Morgenthau Plan to motivate his retreating army, telling Germans that the Allies intended to make them slave laborers in a peasant economy.)

Still, the fear of an eventual return of German aggression was inescapable. The revelations of the Holocaust and the other crimes of the Nazis were still fresh in European minds. Churchill, though out of office, was one of the first Western leaders to understand that Germany needed to be rehabilitated both morally and economically if Europe was to achieve a durable peace and prosperity. Only Churchill could have urged that Germany be welcomed back into the bosom of Europe right after World War II. Any other politician making such a recommendation would have risked obloquy or ostracism. But the European statesman to whom the nations overrun by Hitler owed their deliverance had to be given respectful consideration. For Churchill, this was a message that had to be heard. No real recovery of Europe could be achieved with the isolation of Germany.

Churchill’s view was in keeping with the principle enunciated in his six-volume memoir of World War II—“In war: resolution, in defeat: defiance, in victory: magnanimity, in peace: good will”—as well as his gracious attitude toward his prewar opponents during his premiership: “If we open a quarrel between the present and the past, we shall lose the future.” Later, in 1952, Churchill told the New York Times: “I always felt during the war that we must strike down the tyrant, but be ready to help Germany up again as a friend.”¹

The key to a peaceful postwar Europe would be the relationship between France and Germany. But this difficult rapprochement, Churchill thought, required an even broader conception of European unity. This he argued in perhaps his second-most famous postwar speech (after the Iron Curtain speech in Fulton), which he delivered in Zurich, Switzerland, in September 1946. In fact his grandson, Winston Churchill II, said that his grandfather considered the Zurich speech to rank second to Fulton in its importance for postwar history.

Surveying the gloomy postwar scene—“the tragedy of Europe”—Churchill warned that a new Dark Age, only narrowly averted through the help of the “great Republic across the Atlantic Ocean,” might “still return.” The victors are quarrelling; the vanquished suffering the “sullen silence of despair.” “The guilty must be punished,” he confirmed. “Germany must be deprived of the power to rearm and make another aggressive war. But when all this has been done, as it will be done, as it is being done, there must be an end to retribution.”

Churchill had already previewed this much of his argument in a speech in the House of Commons shortly before traveling to Zurich: “Indescribable crimes had been committed by Germany under the Nazi rule. Justice must take its course, the guilty must be punished, but once that is over—and I trust it will soon be over—I fall back on the declaration of Edmund Burke, ‘I cannot frame an indictment against an entire people.’” Now in Zurich he proposed the next step:

Yet all the while there is a remedy which, if it were generally and spontaneously adopted, would as if by a miracle transform the whole scene, and would in a few years make all Europe, or the greater part of it, as free and as happy as Switzerland is today. What is this sovereign remedy? It is to re-create the European Family, or as much of it as we can, and provide it with a structure under which it can dwell in peace, in safety and in freedom. We must build a kind of United States of Europe. [Emphasis added.]

While describing a United States of Europe as a “federal system,” Churchill did not specify how formal a political union there ought to be or whether this union required the modification of national sovereignty, as many present-day schemes of European unity do. Certainly Churchill’s record and political philosophy suggest that he would be critical of the centralized bureaucracy growing in Brussels under today’s European Union. He described his idea in vague and general terms, loosely analogous to, or compatible with, the newly established United Nations. He thought the project should start with some kind of European council: “The first step is to form a Council of Europe. If, at first, all the states of Europe are not willing or able to join the Union, we must nevertheless proceed to assemble and combine those that will or can.”

The main rhetorical objective of the speech, however, was to gain general acceptance for the idea of European union, which a specific legal or constitutional proposal, such as today’s Lisbon Treaty, would have undermined. Instead, he prepared his audience for the audacious heart of his message:

I am now going to say something that will astonish you. The first step in the re-creation of the European family must be a partnership between France and Germany. In this way only can France recover the moral leadership of Europe. There can be no revival of Europe without a spiritually great France and a spiritually great Germany.

The idea of a more or less formal European political union did not originate with Churchill. In fact, he himself identified its antecedent as a proposal of the seventeenth-century French king Henry of Navarre for a pan-European council to mediate religious disputes.

Two years after Churchill’s Zurich speech a conference was convened in The Hague to pursue the idea of European integration. To Churchill’s great satisfaction, the conference included a German delegation. Although the conference was not an official diplomatic meeting of states (which is why Churchill, then out of power, could attend and take a leading role), it tried to build political momentum behind the idea of European unity. The conference was, as Churchill described it, a “Congress of a Europe striving to be reborn.”

In his speech to The Hague, Churchill proposed going beyond a council, as he had suggested in Zurich, and establishing a European Assembly. Today’s European Parliament in Strasbourg is such an assembly.

After the conference at The Hague, the first steps in European economic integration took place with the formation of the European Coal and Steel Community—the precursor to the Common Market of the 1960s, itself the precursor to the European Union in the 1990s. Step by step—a phrase Churchill used many times over his long career—European integration took shape, and another general war in the heart of Europe eventually became unimaginable.

Reconciliation between France and Germany was accomplished faster than perhaps even Churchill imagined under the leadership of the first elected postwar German chancellor, Konrad Adenauer, who worked productively with French foreign minister, Robert Schuman. Churchill later praised “their remarkable wisdom and their courage” in ending the centuries-old enmity between the two nations, and he called Adenauer “the wisest German statesman since the days of Bismarck.” (On the occasion of his eightieth birthday, Churchill responded to Adenauer’s birthday greetings, “I am high on the list of your admirers as a statesman and as a patriot.”)

But Churchill judged rightly that his “United States of Europe” proposal with France and Germany at the center would “astonish.” The London Times observed, “Churchill has proved again that he is not afraid to startle the world with new and even, as many must find them, ‘outrageous propositions.’” The Times, which still had not got over his Fulton speech, missed the closing invitation of the Zurich speech in which Churchill expressed the hope that in the fullness of time perhaps the Soviet Union might be drawn into the United States of Europe. Instead the Times wrote: “He [Churchill] predicates his need for Germany in his scheme on the assumption that Europe is already irrevocably divided between East and West. That is the peril of his argument.”

Here the Times completely misread Churchill. Not only did Churchill not regard the Cold War as “irrevocable,” but he expressed the hope that the Soviet Union might join a unified Europe, a hope based on his parallel prediction that the Cold War would come to an end—a prediction that was even more astonishing than French-German reconciliation or the swift rise of European unity.